Sunday, December 05, 2004

St. Nicholas.

Today many Dutch families are celebrating St. Nicholas evening (Sinterklaasavond in Dutch). This includes Bjørn and his family. The tradition starts a few weeks earlier, where they draw names blindly to determine who's going to take care of which present. The objective, then, is to create a surprise around the present and write a poem to go with it, all in secret. In a few hours the mythical St. Nicholas will pass their home and somebody will be knocking the door very loudly. This is where they come out to find the surprises they made, as if St. Nicholas left them there. Nobody actually believes this anymore of course, but they all believed St. Nicholas existed when they were young.

This shows partly that you can make children believe almost anything, even that some old man keeps visiting the Netherlands from Spain, later leaving presents on everybody's doorstep on the same evening and go back to Spain. When St. Nicholas actually knocks the door and enters the house, to the children that's him and of course he exists because they can see him right there. This early in life, there is not much to relate this to, and you have hardly any idea about scale, distance or time. Good thing we all eventually come to our senses, though some people come to their senses more than others.

4 comments:

Hello Bjorn, this Nick. Thanks for visiting my blog. Actually I think learning C++ while trying to implement something in The Mana World is a good idea. So, yeah, I am expressing interest in participating on that project right now. I honestly do not know when to start, though. However, once I explore the world often enough, I should be able to point out what I'd like to contribute. :-)

Secondly, I can't believe one of the main contributors on the Mana World visited my blog! I enjoyed the game and because of that I really look up to you guys.

Haha, well you mentioned The Mana World, so I was bound to find out about it at some point. :-)

A good way to start is to check out the development version of the game and compile it yourself. From there on you can browse the code and start making changes, once you've figured out what you'd like to change.

Now I better make sure to write something interesting to this blog from time to time. As you probably noticed this most recent entry is from 4 years ago. :-)

Well, you'd better. ;-) Probably an simple way to start would be to post progress on some things that you are working on (if you're comfortable with posting them, of course). Screenshots and stories would be nice.